The Nick-ler said:

For my money, Greg will always have the overall title. With his creativity and staggering work ethic, there's no one more deserving of it. That said, I think Erick should get the title of Knight of Flowers.

I had the pleasure (and displeasure - since it was the only loss I had that wasn't a very close game or that I couldn't have won) of playing Greg's deck in the joust tourney. I don't think anyone expected a Knights of the Hollow Hill deck to do well, let alone get to the finals.

You have certain expectations when you sit down against a Martell deck and all of them were wrong when I played against him. He took a deck that on paper looks like a pile of rubbish and made something extremely resilient and just unpredictable. It became apparent very quickly that he'd spent a lot of time and energy putting the deck together, that it was organized chaos, and he is some sort of mad scientist. I didn't see a single "staple" Martell card in his deck, although he had like 30 cards in his hand and I'm not sure what was left unplayed. I didn't see He Calls it Thinking, Burning on the Sand, Venomous Blade, or any of the like.

I was pretty dumbfounded with how much he was able to bounce his and my guys back to hand, put guys from the board to his hand to bring another defender down on the board after I declared attackers, abuse the hell out of parting blow, and just flat out stop me from getting challenges in. I had to chuck my hand of four or five cards turn one to stop him from recurring Viper's Bannermen and successfully defend my challenge.

Not to detract from anyone else, but Greg won overall champion in my mind. He defied the entire meta game and played cards no one else really appreciates and performed extremely well in both events.

I'm definitely with stasis on this one, watching Greg play his deck was like watching some sort of intricate clockwork contraption. There were a shitton of moving parts in there and it was incredible the synergy with which they functioned.

Let's argue over who likes Greg the most.

FFG apparently needs to introduce the "Champion of Hearts," where all players vote for their favorite player. Also, it should count towards the overall champion title.

im starting to feel bad for corey reading this thread

Mathias Fricot said:

If you want to feel worse, consider the fact that he doesn't even like to play in tournaments because he feels it spoils the fun.

JackT said:

I can support this idea!

Dobbler said:

Mathias Fricot said:

Agreed. Corey, if you're reading this, I don't want to detract from you personally at all. We all know that you're a stellar player. But the scoring system this year is the wonky thing about the overall title. I really don't think that any players should win rounds without those wins counting. In either format.

I agree. I took 6th overall and I never made it out of the first round of 16 in either tourney.

It doesnt make sense that someone could go 6-0 in preliminaries (30 points, then lose first round in top 16) and get the same amount of points as someone going 4-2 in preliminaries who won the tournament (30 points).

Fieras said:

I agree, but I think the problem is more the fact that for 70ish players you should cut to top 8, not top 16. A 4-2 record making the elimination rounds devalues the swiss rounds in my opinion. (Edit: err, sorry, I meant to say cut to top 8 and play an extra round of swiss; also "devalue" might not be the right word, but ideeally you would like everyone in the elimination rounds to be within 1 loss of each other. Corey ended up with a better overall joust winning percentage than anyone else in the tournament).

schrecklich said:

True enough. Thats the problem here. The numbers add up one way, but it just doesn't seem to work as intended. The joust winner should get more points than anyone (save for maybe 2nd place potentially).

Just add up your placing in each format and add them together. Lowest wins, like golf. Computers do all the work for us with strength of schedule.

Mathias Fricot said:

Well if this were the case then we would have crowned Greg the Overall Champion. But since placing 4th out of 78 Melee competitors and 2nd out of 71 Joust players just isn't good enough. That's laughable really. FFG's scoring system is just bonkers.

Corey effectively took 1st and 9th. Its not like he didn't deserve it as well.

widowmaker93 said:

It seems a complicated mess however you look at it. I mean, technically Corey won only 2 fewer games than Brett did, since he went 6-0 in the prelim rounds and Bret went 4-2 but then won another 4 games in the out-rounds. (This also means Corey won only 2 fewer games in the joust than Greg, I think.) I'm not saying prelim rounds should be weighted more, but it seems like that's essentially how FFG did it. Counting all the rounds does seem fairer to me (5 pts for each win), but then it could have still created strange situations where someone does extremely well in the preliminary rounds but has a low ranking because they are eliminated early (like Corey was in the joust). I'm really not sure what the right answer here is....

Fieras said:

True, but the part that bugged me is that Corey had Overall wrapped up PRIOR to the start of the Joust finals. So if you think this is an uproar imagine what it would be like if Greg won Joust had Melee final table and STILL not been Overall Champ (as would have been the case). That is just ridiculous.

goshdarnstud said:

If we'd scored the points for "round of 16 (joust & melee)" and "round of 8 (joust)" the maximum points for both sides would have remained the same. The biggest impact would have been on players who'd been in positions 5-16 that received no additional points. Had both the high scorers in both tournies not also done well in the other half, players that ranked in that group would have been much more highly rated overall, but had nothing to distinguish them from players not making the cut (although admittedly, octofinal losers in joust and last place at the round of 16 tables in melee would have the same scenario even if you did score those regularly).

If we had scored the all rounds, the top 10 look like this:

3rd Greg Atkinson (Dobbler) 56 points + 10 + 10 = 76

1st Corey Faherty (baragwin) 64 points + 10 + 0 = 74

2nd Erick Butzlaff (finitesquarewell) 58 points + 10 + 5 = 73

4th Jonathan Benton (longclaw) 51 points + Semis + 5 = 56++

7th Brett Zeiler (IntentionallyAnonymous) 46 points + ? + 10 = 56+

10th John Kraus (Deathjester26) 45 points + 10 + 0 = 55

4th Chad Baumgardt (chadwick537?) 51 points + Semis + 0 = 51++

6th John Deatrick (Fieras) 47 points + Semis + 0 = 47++

7th Rick Branagan (?) 46 points + ? + 0 = 46+

7th Chad Jamnik (?) 46 points + Semis + 0 = 46+

>Semis means I know they were in the round of 16 but don't have a score, ? means I don't know if they made it that far<

In particular, both Casey Galvan and Dan Strouhal would have 10 points from their two additional wins in joust which would quite possibly put them on this list.

I do recall at the beginning of the blended system, outrounds did earn all players a bonus of one point based on "importance." I suppose in this case you'd have to decide whether importance actually mattered, and give the melee tables a bonus 2 pts. to keep the total possible even. Also interesting to note, the jump from 7 pts. between 3rd & 4th, and 11 pts between 3rd and the maximum Jonathon or Brett could have under this change. It's also closer to the "math" that the LoB suggested (if you score 5th-16th) based on seeding. Greg would be 4th & 2nd, Erick 3rd & 5th, Corey 1st & 9th, and Jonathan something like 10th & 7th.

Interesting additional thought (which I will cross-post to the melee thread), swiss pairings in melee have been suggested as a way to lower the chances of king-making (though also reducing the chances of players scoring 3 firsts). How should pairings be done in a round of 16? Randomly? Or something like 1,5,9,13; 2,6,10,14; etc.? Or perhaps 1,8,9,16; 2,7,10,15; etc.?

Thats why you should just use final placement. Not total points.

Mathias Fricot said:

Ya this would really be much easier, more intuitive and more logical.

@Twn2dn That would be easy to fix. If someone didn't play in one event they get placed based on however many participants +1. So if someone won Joust and didn't play in Melee where there were 64 people they would get 1 and 65. Problem solved.

LaughingTree said:

Yeah, I think something like this would be an improvement for scoring for overall. I definitely side with the "more awards/champion cards are better, not worse" argument, and would hate to see the overall champion award cut just because it's hard to nail down who that should be. I mean, maybe a lot of us can agree that Greg *should* be crowned the overall champ, but it still seems better to me to have Corey (an equally worthy player) as an overall champ than none at all. This way we get three incredible new champion-designed cards.

I do still think that the whole melee competitive scene is a mess though. I didn't play with any metamates, but kingmaking was still by far the defining characteristic in the three games I played, more than deckbuilding or game-play skill. I suppose one can argue negotiating is a factor in game-play skill, but for those of you who know both me and Maester Luke/Erick Butzlaff/etc, there is just no way I will ever be as convincing/manipulative as those guys in melee. (No offense guys, you are great players in joust and melee both.) They have a hyper-gregarious gene that I lack, and given the same deck, I'm pretty sure they'd beat me in melee every time.

And there seems to be a sub-element to this whole "melee negotiating" note, which is to say that no matter how well you negotiate, you may lose simply because an opponent thinks it would be "fun" to arbitrarily choose a winner. In one game, an opponent picked an underdog to help win. Why someone would reward a player for performing poorly early in the game by helping them win later is beyond me, but then again I guess if you're going to overtly play "kingmaker," you may as well use that muscle to swing the game as much as possible.

I just can't wait to play melee again. I made a stack of about 80 burn cards. should be fun.

Twn2dn said:

I saw the opposite to this a few times. Two of the melee tables at which I sat had, for lack of a catchier term, a "kingbreaker" (which is still kind of catchy). The only goal was to put certain players into last, with no regard for who actually won.

i still dont see the need of an overall champ, at least not the way its played now with melee.

anyway, i think the number of players of a tourney should also be taken into account. for instance, if there are 80 melee fighters and only 30 joust players, the win of melee should weigh more than the win of the joust.

i suggest to divide the place by the number of players, and the sum of both gets you the final total of points for the overall ranking. the on with the lowest result is the winner.

for example:

gregg: 4:78 (melee) + 2:72 (joust). total: 0,079059

corey: 1:78 (melee) + 9:72 (joust). total: 0,137820

nb: a players that doesnt play eithe rthe melee or the joust shouldnt be part of the overall ranking. i mean, it says OVERALL, so imo not playing one of them is the same as dropping from this competition.